> Even if you don't sell things, you have to trade them. To administer
> the fair distribution of goods and services you have to make them
> comparable. That means judging their relative value and coming up with
> a barter scheme. It's simply inevitable.
Boddi satva assumes the continuance of private property within socialism. Alas, if his producers were not private producers, why would they trade with each other (at a price for their goods, I assume, else how are we to compare the goods made for sale in the market?) In fact I don't understand how the producers of the kind of things that are made could exist except as institutions, as firms. The producers of JCBs presumably cannot directly barter their products for jam and Champagne, for units of electricity for their workers' homes, water for use at home, children's clothing, shoe polish, Christmas presents, something for Aunt Ethel's birthday. Bs's model must assume intermediate expressions of value - something given in exchange for the JCB; some of that given to the workers. Modern production is based in institutions. Institutions are not the stuff of boddi satva's barter model.
The reality of isolated decision making and, presumably, each firm's command of its products is the foundation of private property, according to the Paris Manuscripts. Social production constituted in the exchange of commodity goods is the heart of the concept of value, isn't it? The regulation of social labour will be orchestrated by this process. The products express the social worth of that labour.
Is there the production of surplus value in this model? Can workers move between 'jobs' and be rewarded with different baskets of goods, different wages? It seems to me that to ask these questions is to answer them. This is why it seems to me that the identification of a capitalist class is not a sure test for the identification of a capitalist society. When it comes to class, the controlling idea is still is the 18th century idea of the owner-manager of a manufactory, not the reality of mass production in the modern world. We now have myriad masses who have an amazing range of claims that entitle them to live off of the social surplus: executive wages and bonuses; 'wages' paid to senior state officials and many junior ones; payments on paper claims (interest, debentures, shares - there is a massive range of these things, payments frequently made to institutions, not directly to rentier capitalists - even institutions such as pension funds); corporate rents; fees to business consultants - i.e. to all those who live on the surplus produced by productive labourers. It might be a group with fuzzy boundaries, but an identifiable group it is.
Mike B gave an example from family life to show that goods can be moved between users without selling or accounting. The same non-fiscal relationships are seen in many human groups that are voluntary associations: In a small town music society, A mends the roof of the practice hall, B makes posters, C cooks lunch for those attending a rehearsal, D E & F play the cello and other things, G updates the data base, H cleans, I is the conductor, J chairs the board. These tasks are incommensurable. They are different forms of human endeavour. That, it seems to be, is why Marx in ch.1 of Capital calls capitalist production verrückte - insane. The world of generalised commodity production does say that one wheel hub = fifteen minutes dentistry = seventeen towels = one day's work from a crew member at McD.
This is a set of social relationships, not natural ones.
I can only repeat Simon Clarke words in Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology;
"Although formulated as theories of social structure, political economy, sociology and historicism shared a liberal social and political orientation, seeing capitalist society as an expression of the needs and aspirations of rational individuals, and evaluated the institutions of capitalist society in relation to individual rationality. This did not mean that these theories were formulated on the basis of a rationalistic theory of action, whether positivistic or idealistic, for the theories were not formulated at the level of the theory of action. The rational individual who underpinned and legitimated the social structure characterised by the theory was not a real but an ideal individual. The conformity of the social structure with individual needs and aspirations was not conceptualised directly, by revealing the origins of social institutions in the actions of real individuals, and establishing the adequacy of those institutions to the individuals' needs and aspirations. Rather the rationality of the social structure in question was explained in terms of its results, by showing that those results conformed objectively to the abstractly defined needs and aspirations of the ideal rational individual. The achievement of the ideal society could not be entrusted to the spontaneous advance of individual reason, for the existence of ignorance, vanity, prejudice, superstition and the abuse of power were barriers to its realisation. Thus the progressive development of society depended on the subordination of the action of individuals to the reproduction of the social structure within which they were inserted. For classical political economy this implied the subordination of the individual, the State and civil society to the market through which the classical economic laws would spontaneously impose a harmonious social order. For sociology and historicism the market alone was not an adequate basis for the realisation of a rational and harmonious social order, and the operation of the market had to be confined within limits set by morality and by the State. In each case, however, the social structure to whose reproduction individuals were subordinated was defined by the social relations of capitalist production, and the ideal rationality of society was an expression of the naturalistic rationality of capitalist relations of production as the necessary expression of the division of labour. It is this common naturalisation of capitalist social relations that defines the common ideological foundations of all these theories of capitalist society...
The distinction between economy and society is not an empirical distinction, but a conceptual one, resting on the conceptual distinction between the essential rationality of capitalism and its social reality, a distinction that in turn rests on the definition of economic relations as essentially asocial, concerning not relations between people, but relations of subjective evaluation of things by abstract individuals, mediated by the technical relations of production and the formal relations of exchange. "
I'll e-mail you the text, if you want. I have it as a Word file.
Richard.